February 20, 2016

...but on a more fundamental level, to prevent bringing down the wrath of the gods on one's officer corps.

From episode 19 of GATEwhere this awkward misunderstanding at the intersection of local customs and common law precedent has nothing whatsoever to do with the epic and tumultuous events happening far from our blissfully unaware heroes. However, it does precipitate a spirited academic debate about the merits of competing methodologies which indirectly leads to our protagonists developing a new appreciation for the importance of keeping informed on current events.

A few things were established in this episode.

1: All of the peoples of this world have very similar creation myths, which bear broad similarities to the Garden of Eden. The first people were brought by God into the sacred forest.

2: As it happens all peoples of the world, believe that the sacred forest of myth is in a direction that on the same bearing from their kingdoms as Alnus Hill.

3:The implication is, that the gate has been opening on Alnus Hill every few millennia, with the other side opening in a different world. This has brought in different peoples which is why the racial dimorphism is so extreme and unlikely from an evolutionary perspective. That is, convergent evolution is one thing, but bird people, rabbit people, cat people and dog people, just ought not to happen.

4:Of course in the next breath it is mentioned that interbreeding between the races has taken place...so I guess they use Punnet dodecahedrons instead of squares here.

Just let it go.

5:There is brief mention of the fact that kobolds exist in this world.

6: The implications of this are that the gate is a very temporary phenomenon and Japan's resource extraction efforts are likely to be quite temporary in the same way that anyone on the non-earth side of the gate could suddenly find their stay quite permanent.

7: All this information comes from Master Mage Mimoza the elderly and somewhat goofy master sorceress who is their hostess. It turns out that she was asked by Rory to research the reason for the huge number of races in this world. Mimoza reveals that she was once an adventurer who accompanied Rory many years ago. (Rory did not recognize her until then.)

Mimoza's response was "Jealous, aren't you?"...to which Rory had no rejoinder.

8: Leili's sister Arpeggio, (2 pictures above) is deeply insecure about her younger sister's August achievements in comparison to her own. However, in addition to that, and being a neurotic collection of cliche's she is also a magical mineralogist of sorts. Thus she's hired by Itami to assist him in his survey moments before said survey is revealed to likely be pointless.

9: The two siblings seem to fight rather a lot:

10: All humans, who are not imperial citizens are considered to be part of a collective called "The Rogue Peoples". (Leili is one of them)

11: While all this is going on, Zorzal, the crown prince of the empire, being played like a fiddle by his bunny squeeze, is preparing to launch a guerrilla war against the JSDF as well as commit other forms of mischief.

That last episode of RWBY must have scarred me because when this happened I FULLY expected her to die on the spot.

12: It looks like Leili's dissertation will have to wait, because our heroes are now on the run.